[MUD-Dev] Re: An Introduction

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 03:05 PM 7/24/98 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence jumping up
to say:
>On Fri, 24 Jul 1998 14:47:47 -0700 
>Caliban Tiresias Darklock<caliban at darklock.com> wrote:
>
>> On 02:40 PM 7/24/98 -0700, I personally witnessed J C Lawrence
>> jumping up to say:
>
>>> I've already championed Steven's TCP/IP books.  Other well used
>>> titles on my book shelf enclude:
>>> 
>>> Advanced Unix Programming In the Unix Environment -- Stevens
>
>> This begs the question of just how advanced Unix programming *out*
>> of the Unix environment would be. Whoa... now THAT'S a programmer! 
>> ;)
>
>Urk.  That's what you get for typing while looking over your shoulder
>at the bookcase.  The correct title is, "Advanced Programming in the
>Unix environment".  <blush>

I think we all know what you meant. ;)

Me, I have a bad habit of buying books and then determining that they
really suck, but picking up one or two things from them. I am not good at
selecting technical books by any stretch of the imagination. Of course,
even a blind dog finds a bone once in a while, so I did stumble over Jesse
Liberty's work and a couple other things... but mostly I throw four hundred
dollars at the bookstore, buy a dozen books, and then discover none of them
are good. Yeah, all together they end up being pretty good, but a $400 book
had damn well better be good. 

Colleague recommendations aren't much better. My best advice so far has
been "Buy O'Reilly", but there are a lot of subjects they don't cover which
I need to know about. Amazon.com's reviews are decent enough, but sometimes
you see weird stuff in them like two reviews, one saying this book is
incredible and the other saying it sucks. So you read the two reviews, and
it appears that the guy who thinks it sucks is an idiot but the guy who
loved it seems pretty much normal... so you buy the book, and it's an
exccellent *book* but a terrible *reference*. I got a book once called
"Building Internet Applications in Visual C++" which was a really good
read... but the code and the technical information were really badly
written. The basic description and the final product were spot-on, but
there in the middle you were supposed to learn something and somehow it got
skipped. Or concealed.

On a more reality-based note, have people noticed that most of the books
that get recommended on this list as "really good" cost $60+?